Ubuntu forums are buckling under the strain at the moment. Unsurprisingly, they've had a record number of people online today. I think the fallout will be lasting some days. If anyone is looking for the fix and can't get an Ubuntuforum page loaded, I posted it in this LXF Forum thread earlier.

Hope this helps anyone with a crashed X-server.

Edit - the fix I posted reinstalls an earlier but working version of xserver-xorg-core. A later version than the broken one is now available in the repositories but I'm going to leave it a few days, and keep an eye on the links that nordle gave, before installing on my setups. One crashed Xserver in one week is enough for me.

oops, missed your post spottedcat . It's funny, well ok its not, but both ubuntu and suse have been getting lots of praise for the last 12mths, with crazy amount of ubuntu chatter in the last few months. Then both have very public and noticably terminal issues. Yes in both cases fixes were put up quickly, and in 99% of cases it wasn't terminal in the sense that everything was lost foreever. BUT when MS releases a patch that breaks stuff, they get shot to pieces.

To be fair ubuntu is provided free of charge, mostly, and everyone has bad days don't they. Even so, the timing could have been mildly better, ie 18mths ago

Fortunately I saw this before doing any recent Ubuntu updates but isn't it annoying. that these things happen.

Well, yes. I did notice the irony. And talking of irony, have you noticed how these two distros are trying to outdo each other in the irony stakes? First SuSE introduces the new Zen updater that is so buggy that it crashes when doing software updates. So they produce an updated version of Zen to fix the bug, but when you try to use Zen to update Zen... Erm... Um... Oh dear.

Now Ubuntu tries to top that with an xserver update that crashes the xserver. My question is, what will Fedora do? Or any of the other distros?

spottedcat wrote: First SuSE introduces the new Zen updater that is so buggy that it crashes when doing software updates. So they produce an updated version of Zen to fix the bug, but when you try to use Zen to update Zen... Erm... Um... Oh dear.

Now Ubuntu tries to top that with an xserver update that crashes the xserver. My question is, what will Fedora do? Or any of the other distros?

Well, fortunately I was OK with SUSE 10.1. Following instructions over on the SUSE Forums I used YOU to install libzypp update and yast2online update, which fixed the problem, and I've been using Zen to update (every time the little orange icon appears) ever since. I think I may have had one strange error message once but apart from that it seems to be behaving itself perfectly.

And because I have been concentrating on Zenwalk recently I haven't done any updates on Ubuntu since last week, so have neatly avoided all the xserver problems (so far ).

I think I'll just steer clear of Fedora for a bit.

It makes you wonder sometimes whether it is worth doing any updates at all.

spottedcat wrote: My question is, what will Fedora do? Or any of the other distros?

You might recall that Fedora got their's over quickly on the release day by ensuring you couldn't install the nvidia drivers, or any other non-GPL modules, to run with the kernel. Soon fixed with an update, IIRC

Rhakios wrote:You might recall that Fedora got their's over quickly on the release day by ensuring you couldn't install the nvidia drivers, or any other non-GPL modules, to run with the kernel.

True. I'd forgotten that. But that was just a common or garden cock-up, and considering Fedora's sniffy attitude to non-GPL stuff I half-wonder if it might have been deliberate. I was thinking rather of real irony such that both SuSE and Ubuntu have now demonstrated. Perhaps, for Fedora, an update to SELinux creating a security breach? Anyone any other ideas?

Got whacked with this one this morning! As I noticed the update was for Xorg I immediately CTRL+ALT-BACKSPACED after the update to get the new version running, big mistake! I was hungover and thinking I was doing something wrong for half an hour before apt-getting lynx and checking the ubuntu forums, then fixing it. I know for most people on these forums this wont really have been much of a problem but Ubuntu does market itself as "Linux for everyone" and I can imagine that many newbies ended up with borked systems after this! It really is a big cock up for Ubuntu this one